The pressure that makes diamonds
I had a dream the other night where I was talking to the mother of my high school Spanish exchange student. She was marveling at my Spanish language skills and how they’d grown (and we were fully having this conversation in Spanish in my dream).
(In my dreams, I am as fluent as a native Spanish speaker!)
I woke up chuckling a little to myself, how easy and fluid I felt speaking in Spanish in my dreams. I thought back to taking Spanish in middle school and high school and even a few courses in college. I remember signing up for those classes in college – “I should really keep up my Spanish” I thought to myself as I browsed the course catalog.
Oh that tricky word. SHOULD.
As a coach, I listen for when my clients use this word. When they put pressure on themselves about something they feel obligated about, vs. something that really lights them up. And I try to catch myself doing the same thing.
But sometimes that SHOULD moves us to do something that is useful for us, good for us, that maybe we wouldn’t have done out of our own sheer delight. Sometimes it propels us to make diamonds.
So how can we know? How can we tell apart the GOOD should from the BAD should?
(If I truly knew the answer to this, I’d probably be a blissfully happy bazillionaire, but alas…I’ll just have to wonder along with everyone else...)
The closest I know how to differentiate is how the shoulds FEEL. Like, when I think “I should do that”, do I chuckle a little, maybe even sigh, and get moving on it? Or does my heart drop, my body get heavy, and I start to fantasize about a meteor hurtling toward earth that, upon landing, will absolutely get me out of doing that thing?
Most of all, I think it’s hard to know. And I think that overwhelming urge to know, to be sure we’re not doing the wrong shoulds, can be the most distressing of all.
So what if we released ourselves from having to be sure, and instead decided to follow our feels toward the good shoulds?
